Hands 2: In Defense of Heero Yuy
by Oedipus Tex
Summary: This is the aftermath of finding out your brother is a Gundam pilot. This is learning to love him, and learning to hate him. This is finding out that the secrets are deep, and wishing they never came to light. Sequel to Hands, about 6 years late!
1. Prologue

**AN: I've decided that I have got to do ****_something_**** about this just sitting on my hard drive. This is the sequel to my earlier fic, ****Hands****, and I highly advise you read that first. OCs ****_abound_**** in this fic. Just warning you.**

**Also warning you that I do not own the rights to Gundam Wing, and am not making any money off this venture. OCs are mine, of course, so if you want to use them, just ask. Thanks!**

**I would like to thank everybody who has encouraged me on this. Loving you all. Kisses (but not in that way)**

* * *

**Hands 2 **

**In Defense of Heero Yuy**

* * *

_Prologue_

* * *

Heero was gone. He was out of their lives, leaving as quickly as he had come, as quickly as he had left before. He disappeared as though he never existed at all, just a ghost that came to delineate himself however faintly on their lives. What were they supposed to do with this phantom that slipped into their essences so solid and unyielding, bowing them to his will? They would fill his empty spot with hunting trips and sound systems, college degrees and music, little pets that were unobtrusive, and pictures that get moved to the back of the mantelpiece.

Yoko wanted to yell at the Preventer agents tearing through her house: "See? This is what's left of him! _Just this_!" She'd point to the cardboard box.

They had told David to gather up the things that were Heero's and put it within this box. This is what the box held: one fishkeeping manual, one copy of _Modern War _with Wing Gundam on the cover, one cell phone, and one blue blanket. There were no schoolbooks or clothing—and not even a dirty sock in the laundry. Heero had left no traces of himself behind. But the worst was that the things he did leave behind had been their gifts to them. They could make no claim on him.

Yoko didn't shout. She sat on the couch in between David and Alex, watching the dismantling of her home. The dozen Preventers, in their charcoal uniforms that were both security guard and Boy Scout, searched every crease and crevice and all the places Yoko would have never thought to check. They overturned the couch cushions, they unscrewed the air vent plates, and they even checked the contents of the fridge. Letters were read, books were opened, cabinets were searched, hampers were overturned, cutlery was fingered, pillows were pulled until the stuffing went out. David finally said something after an agent knocked over the fishbowl, but Wufei Chang rescued the fish and then sat on the coffee table in front of them, looking at them with his perfect circle black eyes. Yoko wanted to tell him that his eyes were uncanny valley and his nose too big, but what she really said was: "This is stupid. You won't find anything."

"Yoko . . . ." Alex whispered, not exactly grabbing her hand, but laying a pinkie across her knuckles.

"You think he would leave something behind?"

"I don't." Wufei had Heero's cell phone in hand and sealed it inside a Ziploc bag. "You'll get this back once we've verified there's nothing of use on here, like the computer. It's procedure."

"That's a crap apology!"

Yoko glanced at David, expecting him to say something to her, but he remained silent, his face distracted as though he was listening to the whisper of his wife a nightmare away. He didn't stir, until Wufei said, "If you have anything to say, now's the time."

Yoko slid further back into the couch cushion, and Alex too, but David barked out an explosive laugh. "You have yourselves to blame for this," he said.

_Oh Lord, did he know_? Yoko thought. She shivered with nervous energy, and it took a saint's share of willpower to look at her father, wondering how he could have known. But he was only talking to Wufei. Yoko's heart settled after realizing that. Paranoia was making her expect the worst.

"You knew he wasn't well," David said. His face was a restrained rage that hadn't been there since the early months of Heero's return. "But you insisted on using him. Are you really surprised about this?"

Wufei coughed into his fist, his eyes traveling over Yoko and Alex. "Dr. Lang, I realize that you probably have no idea where he is, but I have a job to do. Your cooperation will make this investigation as painless as possible."

"I never knew you were such a tool, Wufei!" Yoko said.

Wufei didn't even blink. "I have some questions."

Yoko feared that they were going to be "taken down to the station" and have bright lights shone in their eyes, but Wufei conducted his interrogation right there on the couch. Yoko didn't know if this was kindness or because he knew that together they were weaker, more likely to implode without their foundation. It was hard not to look at Alex during the questioning, especially since Wufei, possibly thinking of Yoko as the weakest link, questioned her first.

She didn't lie, but she didn't tell the truth. She had seen Heero earlier in the day, but she didn't know if he took anything with him. Wufei asked if she knew why Heero had left, and she said _No_ but meant _Yes_. When probed if Heero seemed unhappy, she said, "He just wants to go to school, that's all he ever wants. So what if he takes off for a few hours? What, you think he's in a plot to assassinate Santa Claus?"

Yoko didn't get the answers to her questions, but she hadn't expected any. They questioned Alex next, and he answered the same way: no, he didn't know anything. The interrogation bypassed David altogether and Yoko wondered how he got so lucky.

The Preventers left at dawn, abandoning the family to the shambles they had created, to the home apart within and without. Yoko kneeled on the floor to put together the photos that had been taken out of their frames, in case messages had been scribbled inside. She did it mostly to avoid looking at her father. He sat, a stricken patient on the couch, staring into the carpet with hollow eyes. It was a frightening visage, with so much expression in so much nothing.

Alex stood in the hallway, swallowing down Advil and coffee, his knuckles straining out sharp from his narrow hands. The shadows were deep in his eyes and face, deeper than the ones in the hall. These men that Yoko once knew so well had become new and corrupted.

After Yoko finished the photos, she fed the fish, wondering what she was doing: This was her chance to kill it. She said, "Dad? You said Heero is sick. To the Preventers. You said he's sick. What's he sick from?"

David pressed his fingers into his brows.

"Dad?"

Alex walked to the windows and whipped the curtains closed against the grayscale sky and the black oaks on the lawn. "Get a clue, Yoko. Heero's sick in the head."

"Oh." Yoko put the picture frames back on the mantel, tilting them into the shallow angles Peggy liked.

"How am I going to tell your mother?" David said from his hands. He began to weep low hitching sobs, sobs that he meant, boiling from the deepest places within him. His children stared, frozen in their inability to handle of the grief of their father, like all children.

Alex slammed the curtains closed again, as if he hadn't done a good enough job the first time. "Why are you crying? It's good he's gone! I was so sick of playing those games."

"I don't know what to tell her. I've lost him again."

Tears shimmered in the crawl space of Yoko's eyes. "I'll call Mama for you," she said, even though her throat squeezed at the thought.

"She couldn't stand to be around him, after what he did," Alex said, his eyes swelling.

Yoko went to find the phone, looking past the frightened guilt in Alex's face and the grief in her father's. She wished that she had never known Heero Yuy. She had been learning to love him, but what room was there for love? It was her fault he had left anyway.

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**Next time: Heero's actually ****_in_**** the chapter!**


	2. The Small Things: Animals

**AN: I admit, feeling a bit iffy about this. Totally realizing that the style between this and Hands is way different, and hope this doesn't disappoint for that reason. But there is a reason for it, at any rate. Plot dictates! And remember, the last chapter was a Prologue, not the First Chapter. :)**

* * *

**Love and Hate**

* * *

The Small Things

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Animals

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**1**

It was such a cold irony that out of a family of pacifists, a Gundam pilot was made.

Pacifism. It was such a lie. From a very young age, even when shopping at Target in a tutu was still okay, Yoko knew pacifism for lip-service. Her mother believed half-heartedly, saying "yes" but meaning "if I have time." If father clung more strident, it was only because it was the only way to mitigate the shame. (Now he can say: _Violence destroyed our family._) Yoko had not grown up naïve. When Heero came into their lives, she knew him for a killer.

But she didn't know him for his relentlessness. She learned the day he committed a murder so tremendous and wicked, she didn't know how'd she ever recover.

He killed Buttercup.

_He killed . . . Buttercup._

With a swoop, a rushing intake of headachy air, a clatter, he killed Buttercup.

It happened back when they were still getting to know each other. Yoko's intractable knowing that something was very wrong with Heero hadn't materialized in full form. (It was still: _Ha ha, isn't Heero such a freak, isn't he funny?_) When the pursuit of happiness built and climaxed in the span of a single month, a December orgy of presents, right before Christmas. Who could have expected it?

For Christmas, they were getting many things (none of them murder). For one, a new house. They couldn't live in the old one anymore, not when no amount of bleach would erase that dingy mark on the kitchen tile. Peggy stopped cooking meals, and while David was willing, no one was willing to eat his meals. So when a house opened up just a few streets down, they grabbed it. They could go to the same school and have the same commute and visit the same neighbors, but have this instead: a new house.

Another thing they got for Christmas was Alex. He was here for the holidays, although perhaps he came to regret it, because it meant a U-Haul.

The other thing they got was family harmony. Shell-shocked stained their kitchen, but he had also done more for their family than they had been able to do for themselves. Incoming tragedy makes petty arguing and petty misunderstandings petty unimportant. The sub-zero relationship with Heero went positive, into the single digits! No one feared he'd leave in the night. He opened to them slowly, like a flower unfolding a petal day-by-day. The more he revealed, the more the cracks showed, but it didn't matter. Yoko laid claim to him: he was theirs forever.

And then he killed Buttercup.

_And then . . . he killed . . . Buttercup._

Yoko stood, stunned into silence, wondering how _the heck! _he did it.

It was Saturday morning. They were moving into the new house, and somehow Heero got out of loading all the furniture on the truck, leaving David and Alex to it. "It's not fair he does all the physical labor," Peggy had said. "He's not a packhorse_._" Except, he basically was, because he had to help unpack boxes instead, and while Heero knew how to shoot guns and pilot mobile suits and disarm terrorists and keep blonde-headed animals from getting their brains shot out, he didn't know anything about houses.

He and Yoko stood in their new living room, boxes stacked on all sides like a facade forest. She opened boxes, and he delivered. And always, he'd find Peggy in the other room and ask, "Where does this go?"

_Sigh._

"The closet, Heero. The bathroom, Heero. The kitchen, Heero."

Yoko chuckled to herself and kept opening boxes. It was fun, like opening treasure chests. David never bothered to write on the box what was inside, or even what room to deliver it to, so it was always a question of what would be behind that cardboard flap. Was it a pair of crystal goblets encrusted with diamonds? An old CD autographed by Michael Jackson? Nope, only a natty old silver teapot and a dishrag.

In the other room, Peggy was clearing her throat, something she only did when she was getting impatient. Her throat clearing always lasted ten seconds. "The towels go in the linen closet, Heero."

There was an awkward silence, and Yoko could only guess at the lost helplessness on Heero's face.

Peggy cleared her throat again. _Ten seconds_. "The linen closet is next to the upstairs bathroom."

After a few minutes, Heero came back in, picked up an armful of dinner plates, and went out again. An incoherent mumbling came from the other room, and Yoko didn't have to understand to know what he was asking.

"Okay," Peggy said. She walked in, Heero following. She took the dishes from him, and set them down. "I think that's enough unpacking for now. Why don't you and Yoko go clean the family room before your father and brother get back with the furniture."

She pulled the vacuum cleaner out from behind a high stack of boxes, and Yoko cursed inwardly. She thought she had found perfect hiding place for the vacuum, but Peggy had a body like a divining rod for cleaning products.

What a life.

Yoko would rather die than clean, but if she refused to clean, she would die. She followed Heero to the family room with Windex in hand. "Welcome to the chain gang!" she said.

"I want that room spotless!" Peggy cried.

Yoko sighed, watching the hard iron enter Heero's eye. That look meant that he was taking Peggy seriously. And then Yoko tripped into the couch.

She picked herself up from the floor, glared at Heero who watched her insipidly instead of helping, and said, "Who put this here? Gah, now we have to clean around it."

Heero nudged his toe against the couch, and it scooted back three feet. Yoko pursed her lips, and sprayed Windex on a paper towel silently. And then they cleaned.

Heero attacked the carpets and Yoko the glass, and all was duress of manual labor. She tried to make it better by showcasing her wit: she insulted Heero (good-naturedly, of course). "Hey, it's dirt, not a mobile suit!" she told him. But Heero proved immune to her comments, not replying or even blinking an eye, and she grew bored with him. She decided Buttercup's cage needed cleaning too. Buttercup appreciated her.

She found the cage on the kitchen counter, and picked it up to take into the family room, intending to use to the vacuum cleaner to suck the junk out of the bottom. "You need a new house too," she told Buttercup. By the time she brought the cage back into the room, Heero had moved to the ceiling fans, standing poised on a chair and sucking up the dust with the long attachment. Yoko grumbled, set the cage on the floor, and opened the door to clear out the newspaper.

Heero attacking ceiling fans was a fascination. She had never thought to clean a ceiling fan with the vacuum before like that, and she wasn't paying as much attention as she should have. She was on the cusp of birthing an insult that would destroy Heero's faith in humanity, when Buttercup squawked, fluttered between her fingers, and flew out the cage, straight into the vacuum hose. The machine burped and rumbled a little, but its maw exuded nothing. There had just been a yellow blur, and now, nothing. Not even a feather.

Yoko looked at Heero, and Heero looked at Yoko, and then Yoko screamed.

Alex was the first to come running into the room, his face red and exerted from moving furniture. He breathed quick, canvassed the room, and before he could ask, Yoko said, "_HeerokilledButtercup_!"

Alex frowned. "What?"

Yoko sobbed. Alex, still looking confused, but glaring at Heero all the same, folded his arms around his sister. He held too tight—she couldn't breathe—and David and Peggy came in.

"What happened?" David asked. He exhaled like a hurricane, like he did when a headache was coming, but he didn't yell.

"He—Heero killed Butteeeeercup!" Yoko wailed.

"The bird flew into the vacuum," Heero said. He stood on the chair, like some mighty hero on high, St. George the Canary Slayer. The vacuum attachment jutted from his hand like a sword. His face was as unhinged as it ever got, but the more accusatory glares he got from Alex, the more his face shuttered up.

"Here." Peggy leaned over and turned off the vacuum, and took the attachment, holding it awkward and away from her, while Heero stepped down from the chair.

"It flew into the vacuum," Heero repeated, his only form of self-defense.

"Real smooth, ace." Alex scrubbed Yoko's shoulder.

"The bird was an idiot."

"You're an idiot!" Yoko screamed.

"No, no," Alex mused. "Buttercup was just a bird-brain."

Yoko had long stopped listening to Alex, directing her energy so that her grief turned into hate. She pushed off from Alex, and sized Heero up, with his bare, smooth shoulders, and forearms like steel girders. Then she burst into tears again when Peggy tilted her head towards the vacuum, as though listening for small tweets.

"It flew right into the vacuum," Heero said.

"You sucked it up across the room! He had no chance!"

"Stop. It was an accident," David said, helping Peggy to shove the vacuum behind a box. They did it in the same attitude a pair of mobsters would while hiding a body, what with shifty eyes and hasty movements. "Just say you're sorry, Heero. It wasn't your fault."

"It is so! He juiced up the vacuum." Yoko pointed at the hodge-podge of screwdrivers and wrenches collected on the couch cushion. "He made it so it'd suck the face off a hippopotamus!"

It was gratifying how everyone looked at Heero, even if he withstood it without shrinking.

"I _did_ make some modifications," he said.

"Why?" David asked.

"The horsepower of the vacuum cleaner was insufficient."

Yoko didn't appreciate the technical terminology he was using. What he should have said was: "I haven't killed enough lately, so I made a way to do it again, dog!" He wasn't sorry for what he had done. His jaw stiffened every time someone suggested he make an apology, as though he resented it.

She could never hurt him physically. The knowledge made a quick change within her from sobbing rage to a searing burn, to an anger that quieted her. She spoke just above a whisper, "Leave the animals out of it, Heero. Stick to killing people. _That's_ something you're good at."

The two weeks' detention didn't surprise her. The two weeks more for refusing to apologize surprised her less. She was proud. She was proud of the horror from her parents, and of Alex's discomfort, how his eyes darted from person to person, gleaning what he could. She was proud of Heero's emotional void, because she learned that this was how he protected himself. And for all her pride, she was glad that little Calli was at the daycare center.

Yoko didn't expect more than a shoebox and a short trip to the trashcan for her dead canary, but she resented that the only person who understood the tragedy was Alex. He rapped his knuckles against the back of her skull and told asinine jokes when Buttercup's death stung her. Her parents didn't even do anything about the vacuum, not until Peggy sucked her satin curtains into the thing.

* * *

**2**

One day, Heero brought home a goldfish.

"A snack?" Yoko asked.

He said nothing and she turned away, her world rocked. There just _couldn't _be even a smidgen of paternal instinct in him, or whatever you called it that made a person want to take care of a living thing. She turned back to watch him handle it, to see what would happen. He took it into the kitchen, presumably to add it to a fishbowl rather than to cook. Perhaps the fish would realize the danger, and choose to take its chances with the garbage disposal instead.

Heero had been having a hard day. That was it. His brain cracked with the hardness of his day.

It started with Calli getting her hands on his wallet, dodging it around the house, and hiding its contents until there was nothing left. "Happy Easter!" she shouted. David spent half an hour looking for Heero's driver's license.

"Don't worry about it," Heero said.

"It's not free to replace. Calli lost it and I will take responsibility for finding it. I'll find it, it's okay."

Heero counted the cash that David had found, although he had counted it twice already. His large eyes settled on David, who was pressing his face against the carpet whilst squeezing his arm underneath the couch.

"You can't lose what you don't have, David."

David rose like the sun rising over the world, but instead of giving forth light, it sucked it up; his face brightened, the atmosphere darkened. The truth came out. Heero had never had a driver's license, and yes, he had driven Peggy around town when she couldn't drive herself. Yes, he had taken David's children in the car with him. No, he had never had a driver's license, not even once in his life. Yes, he had been quite comfortable driving without one, and no, he hadn't felt guilty about it, not even for a minute.

The conversation had been uncomfortable for everyone, although Yoko, who witnessed it, had such a glow warm about her innards.

Heero escaped David's wrath when he went after the mail. Heero used to never care about the mail, but he had a motive nowadays. He was trying to get into college.

Everyone had assumed he get in one without trying, but Yoko was pretty sure getting into college easy didn't mean rejection letters. And rejection letters did come. They all said he lacked "life experience." The universities he wanted to enter wanted their students to have studied abroad, have artistic talent, and have volunteered for peace-loving organizations. They wanted students who could bring a unique perspective to the campus. Heero's problem was that he wasn't imaginative enough to lie, and maintaining his secret identity meant a sparse application.

So Heero came back in after getting the mail, and opened his letters in typical Heero-Yuy fashion: with diligence, even the junk mail. After he had opened them all, he stared at them as though he was being softly stifled.

Peggy said gently, "Maybe you should try for schools that aren't so discriminating."

Heero glowered.

Alex walked by and slapped his knuckles against Heero's chest. "If the Preventers want to keep their tabs on you all the time, at least they could pull a few strings." His eyes were luminescent.

"I'm going to get batteries," Heero said, walking out the front door.

Peggy sighed into her cup of tea, resting her chin on her wrist.

When Heero returned from the store with a goldfish bag dangling from his fist, Yoko took it as a sign that he had lost it.

Once the fish had been encapsulated within a bowl and placed on a credenza, Yoko approached carefully to view it up close. Her instincts told her it couldn't have been an ordinary goldfish. Heero wouldn't stand for ordinary. But it seemed ordinary enough, doomed to a soulless, tedious life in a square bowl, without a neon pebble or rainbow marble to break up an endlessly watery scene.

When she got closer, she realized it wasn't so ordinary after all. It looked like a Dorito that had sprouted fins and then ran afoul of Satan. It was angular and skinnier than its brethren, although of an unusually attractive color, like a gold coin at the bottom of a fountain. It had a deep pit where its right eye should have been. Yoko shuddered. It wasn't ugly, but it was wrong, and she could imagine it growing fat while staring at the world with a discerning eye, all the more powerful for being half-blind.

"What's its name?" she asked.

Heero was extracting Calli's hand from the bowl. "It doesn't have one."

"Why?" Calli asked.

"It's a fish."

"How typical." Yoko peered at the fish, until its black orb met hers, fishy flat but alive. "I'm going to kill it the first chance I get," she said.

* * *

**Next time: Alex gets jealous!**


	3. The Small Things: Jealousy

**AN: Sometimes, some chapters just kick you in the butt. This is that one.**

**Btw, thanks for all of your reviews. Those of you who think Yoko was a brat in the last chapter . . . she sorta has always been a brat, hasn't she? But if you think she's bad, wait til you see the rest of the family!**

* * *

**Love and Hate**

* * *

The Small Things

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Jealousy

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**1**

Alex's jealousy of his brother started when he was seven years old. He was caught one day playing with the toys on Hajime's side of the room. Mama took him and shook him, shrieking those were _Hajime's _and _how could he they were Hajime's_,and she wept and she shook him until he wept too. And Daddy was barely back from the strange Other Place he had been, a cold and empty place Alex didn't like sleeping over in except it meant being with his father—and Daddy stood there quiet and heavy, and let Mama shake Alex and dig fingernails into his arms.

After that, Alex never spoke of his kidnapped baby brother; but when he got to college, he used it as a conversation starter. He was studying to become a journalist, and he pretended he would become famous by writing a moving article about surviving his brother's kidnapping. So while other students used their grades and interests, their loves and hates and _I-don't-care_s_, _to make friends and influence people, Alex used a photograph. He passed it around, saying, "This is my mother and father, and my sisters Yoko and Calli. My brother was kidnapped when I was five."

He dated the girls that said, "Poor you!" This was possibly the best explanation for why he was always going through a break-up.

He felt strangely powerful for having this tragedy in his life. It created an extra spark in him that few others had, the tonal shift that belongs to the overcomer alone, and he was quite happy without that brother whose absence defined him. The ugliness within was dazzling.

Then while Alex was on break from school, Hajime came back.

He wasn't what anyone expected or hoped, but Alex just shrugged. Heero's not so passive-aggressiveness bored him. Well, it was like getting a new puppy, wasn't it? And if the puppy chewed the furniture sometimes, it was expected. And if the shadowy Hajime of his memory and Heero Yuy were two different species, that was expected too. Alex preferred it that way.

Then he found out Heero was a Gundam pilot. Then he found out how a crazy man attacked his family, and Heero saved them. Shoot, Alex couldn't compete with that. He was studying in college about protecting your sources, not protecting your family from deranged maniacs!

Suddenly, Alex was jealous again. Who was this interloper?

Would he pale and just be a shade in the light of Heero Yuy's glory? Competing with a ghost your entire life does things; now, Alex had to compete with a real thing. He worried about going home for Christmas. And when Heero killed Buttercup, he felt so much better. He said, "Heero isn't a monster, just a misfit. He's smart, but so am I, and _I _am socially well-adjusted."

Then they went out to eat. It was to an American-dining restaurant, Yoko's pick because her pet had met with misfortune. Alex would rather go to an ethnic place because American dining meant burgers, pasta, fajitas, and stir-fry—a mishmash of international food, none of it authentic. Alex liked to think he strived for authenticity in a world that settled for the sham.

They sat at a booth with crackly seats and a table that smelled of that gross dirty-wet-rag smell, and Calli was in the booster, kicking Alex in the knees. Then Alex realized the waitress was in love with Heero. Straight-up.

When Heero rolled up his sleeves, he broke hearts.

"How may I take your order?" the waitress breathed. Her pellucid and watery-wide gaze never left his form.

Heero pointed to something on the menu, grunting ape-like. The waitress' eyes crossed, as if caught in a half-swoon. Heero didn't notice. She took his order and his menu and left the table. The rest of the family stared, their menus still clutched in their hands.

Dizzy-eyed waitress reappeared, giggling and blushing redder than before. "My bad! Totally forgot to . . . What may I get you, ma'am?"

"We get free stuff all the time if we bring you-know-you along," Yoko whispered to Alex, once the waitress left, her job fulfilled. "They did something to his genes. We once sent him to the front to get a refill at Chuck-E-Cheese's, and he came back with a free pizza!"

Alex muttered, "What a freak."

"Stupid waitress," David said.

Alex hadn't meant the waitress.

* * *

**2**

Yoko was firmly aware that Alex was jealous of Heero, and how could he not be? Yoko wasn't a man, but even _she_ was threatened by Heero. But it wasn't Heero's inherent physicality that threatened her, but his unwavering mental _density_.

He had the nerve to ask her a favor.

Yoko and Alex were sitting on the family room floor, hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree, when Heero came in and asked Yoko for the favor. Just like they were some happy little family. Yoko looked at him and thought and thought until her head was just filled with her thinking. She didn't even register Alex hanging Christmas ornaments from his ears like earrings, trying to make her laugh.

"If I give you money, will you shop for me?"

This is what Heero said.

And Yoko thought, _Christmas_. _What a larf_!

Heero had killed Yoko's bird. Yoko had hurt his feelings, no matter how he showed she didn't. And now here is Yoko, wanting to smash the ornaments and grind them into fanciful dust and tell Heero that's what he had done to her when he killed her bird—the greatest betrayal ever told except for Judas—but . . . well! She had done the same to his heart, or whatever he had that approximated a heart, and Yoko couldn't even _leave the house_ without an adult and _Lord! _she deserved it, but all she could think was _Heero killed Buttercup_.

_Growup growup growup growup_, Yoko told herself.

Heero stood behind her, he like prey and she like predator, and Yoko observed Heero's reflection in a glass ornament. Through such lens, the cosmos became miniscule and deformed, and infinitely detailed; all curved into the negative space where the focal point was Heero Yuy in that small world.

She had to rethink, slowly, what was going on. She had to leave off all the emotional baggage that was making her nuts . . . .

She and Alex were in the family room, hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree, and Heero had just asked her for a favor. She was sure Heero opposed Christmas on Principle. She was sure he only remembered because he saw the tree (the look on his face when he came in was, _Oh, there _is_ a world around me_!) and she was sure he was only getting snappy with the presents because he wanted to keep the peace with Calli. But Yoko also knew what it cost Heero to ask for favors. Hadn't she caught him just the other day, standing outside of David's study for five minutes, gathering the gumption to ask David some favor? He had pressed the tips of his sneakers against the new trim of their new house, until little marks were set.

She was hanging brand new Christmas ornaments David and Peggy bought just because Yoko and Calli begged and cajoled because the old ones got lost in the move, even though they had opened and searched _every single box_. Now, they had a rainbow universe to go on their tree, and Yoko could afford to have a rainbow heart.

But rainbows also promised pots of gold at the end of them, and never delivered. Rainbows were a tease.

Yoko twisted to face Heero. "Why me?" she asked. "Is it because you don't have . . . one of these?" She whipped out her brand-new, so shiny it'd blind a blind man driver's license from out her pocket.

Alex said to Heero, "No one's still hasn't taken you to get your license? Geez, I'll take you."

"No, you won't," Peggy voice said, from the other room.

Alex shrugged. Part of Heero's punishment for driving without a license was no one was supposed to take him to get one. Yoko thought it remarkable, parents turning children against children. But Alex and Heero were both over 18, so she bet Alex would take Heero anyway, just because they were both technically adults and could assert some independence.

She was wrong.

"Heero, my friend," Alex said, "it's about time you learned about the bus system."

Heero remained silent, keeping his arms crossed in front of his chest. He didn't take his eyes off Yoko, like he could push his will on her.

"Look, _I'll_ take you to the mall." Alex slapped a hand against the back of Heero's leg, and Heero jerked his leg away, as if it was a bug crawling on him. Alex jammed his hands into the ornament box.

Heero waved several paper bills in front of Yoko's face, and Yoko snatched them.

"_OkayI'llgo_," she said.

"Can't do your own Christmas shopping, Heero?" Alex asked. The ornaments trembled from between his tight fingers, and when he placed them on the tree, he did it very particular.

"We don't let Heero shop for presents," Yoko said, pretending to sniff the money. "He's pretty much the worst shopper in the world. He buys practical things. Oh! For my birthday, he bought me sunglasses. Dorky ones, to keep the sun out of my eyes when I'm driving. I had to, you know, _pretend_ to be happy when I opened them. _Gah_, all my friends were there!"

"Statistically, newly licensed teenage drivers are the worst drivers on the road," Heero said.

"I wonder what the statistics are for people who drive without licenses at all?" Yoko counted the money. "Wow. This is, like, four hundred bucks!"

"I want receipts."

Alex finished putting the last of the ornaments on the tree while Yoko and Heero discussed what gifts to get David and Peggy. They had to shut their mouths real quick when Calli came into the room. She still didn't speak very much, but just before David and Peggy's wedding anniversary, she had walked straight up to Peggy and said very clearly, "Tiffany's." So everyone shut their gobs while she wrapped her arms around Heero's legs and then went tottering off to climb the couch to look at the goldfish.

Yoko inspected the tree. "You know," she said to Alex, "instead of becoming a journalist, you should become a professional tree decorator. You only have to work 1 month a year, so you can spend the rest of the time getting high or whatever it is you like to do."

"Hey! What I say!" Heero suddenly snapped.

They turned to see Calli darting her hand away from the top of the fishbowl, sliding her wet fingers into her lap with a bashful smile. Alex scowled.

"Tell him to be nice to you," Alex said. "Get him!"

"Mean Heero," Calli agreed. She lifted a slim black object in her hand, looking at Heero unwaveringly. "Bad boy."

Heero narrowed his eyes, and then slapped a hand against his back pocket. Alarm flashed across his face, but just as he opened his mouth to say something, Calli sang, "Bye-bye, phone!" and threw Heero's cell phone straight into the fish bowl. The fish zoomed around the tank like orange lightening, contained.

Heero loosed the floodgates and a torrent of Japanese words—curse words, Yoko was sure—flew out his mouth. He launched himself across the room; Calli scrambled out-of-the-way as he crammed his hands into the bowl to rescue his phone. It came out dripping buckets of water.

Alex fell onto his side, shaking with laughter.

"Mama knows some trick with rice for that," Yoko said. She thought of dead puppies, to not laugh so heartlessly, like Alex. "Saves the phone or something."

Heero went tearing off to find Peggy. Calli ran after, weeping like the phone. "Don't tell, Heero!" she screamed. "I sorry!"

"No, wait Calli! Come back!" Alex shouted from the floor. "My little pickpocket! I'm taking her to Vegas!"

"I guess this means cruddier Christmas presents from him," Yoko sighed, wondering how much a new cell phone cost. She didn't like to give back the money Heero gave her. David made good money as a surgeon, but he was all about responsibility and earning things, and didn't share it very much with her—at least, not as much as he should have.

Alex squinted at the four hundred smackers passing back-and-forth in Yoko's hands. "Where does he get money like that? He doesn't have a job."

"Yeah, he's got one."

"I've never seen him go."

"He hacks computers on the Internet."

Alex opened a bag of pretzels Yoko had hidden when Calli came into the room, and flicked a few across the room at her. "You're so stupid."

"It's true." Yoko bounced to her knees when Heero walked in, looking like he wanted to murder the world. "Heero, you hack computers for a living, right?"

Heero was staring at a Ziploc bag full of rice he cradled; his concentration was so great Yoko couldn't catch his attention until she threw a handful of pretzels at him. "What?"

"You hack computers."

"What? When?"

Yoko shrieked in laughter. "Oh Gah! Listen to how he answers that question! Heero, you hack computers for a living."

"It's _called_ white hat. I test company firewalls, performing pen tests and vulnerability assessments, identifying weaknesses—"

"I don't want your life story." Yoko turned to Alex. "See? He hacks computers."

Alex ignored her, scrutinizing Heero with half-shut eyes. "What company do you work for?"

"The Computer Technology Division of Winner Enterprises."

Alex nodded as though he was some wobbly-headed Ken doll. "How long you been doing that?"

"Five months."

"Before you even graduated high school? How'd you get a job like that?"

Heero shuffled the rice bag around and didn't say anything.

"He slept with the boss," Yoko snickered. "Makes your hamburger job look _fantastic_, don't it?"

Alex stared intensely at Heero, as though trying to decipher his secrets by sight alone.

Lord, he was just _green_ with jealousy.

Yoko and Alex would find out just how low jealousy could make a man.

* * *

**AN: I promise that we'll be getting into the real meat of the story starting next chapter. Cause guess who's coming to dinner?**


	4. The Small Things: Friends

**Love and Hate**

* * *

The Small Things:

* * *

Friends

* * *

**1**

The college Heero ended up at was not his first choice, nor his second, third, fourth or tenth. The university had a good reputation though, even if its admissions standards were clearly less vigorous than more prestigious schools. And it took his application so close to the start of the semester. No, the main thing against this school was being in the same town as the Langs.

Peggy sort of wiggled when she found out, taking it as a victory that Heero wanted to be with them. Yoko explained Heero was just sticking around for convenience, like the way he lived in their house months after swearing up and down he was leaving the moment he turned 18. She ended up grounded for a week.

But when school started, instead of staying in the dorm, Heero continued to stay with them. This arrangement was preferable to his disappearing off the map, but was also frightening and unconscionable. Yoko had to open her notebook and list the reasons why Heero could possibly want to stick around.

This is what she got out of it:

1) College was expensive. When Heero opened his wallet, moths flew out, so not even a part-time hacker job paid good.

2) Heero had applied for scholarships. Yoko wasn't sure if there were things like Marksmanship scholarships, but Heero would try for those, definitely.

3) Heero hadn't been arrested yet for misdirecting funds into his bank account. Yoko took this more as incompetence on the part of law enforcement, rather than the law actually being followed.

Looking over what she had written, it was only so obvious: Heero was poor! He _had _to warm up to them, like the way people stranded in blizzards _had _to get naked together and share body heat. It was a matter of survival. He even spent an afternoon helping Yoko with a school presentation about her family tree.

They sat in the living room, David's laptop open between them. The breeze kept blowing onto the back of Yoko's head through a window, so she moved down to the floor in front of Heero, using him as a windbreak. He balanced a notebook on his knee and wrote characters in it. When he gave it to her, she turned the paper around a few times until he righted it.

"These don't look anything like the wall thingies," Yoko said. She motioned at Peggy's decorative ceramic wall plaques, the ones with a tiny bit of their heritage: they said "Love," "Peace," and "Joy" respectively, in Japanese.

Heero looked at Yoko, his stare dull.

"Right, ignore the plaques." Yoko looked back at the Japanese Heero had written for her: it was supposed to say her name, except there was no differentiation between "L" and "R" in Japanese, so her last name wasn't exactly the same and there was no way of writing a "G" like that either—at this point Yoko asked Heero if that was why the English word "Congratulations" was always misspelled in anime.

"Well, thanks anyway," Yoko said, practicing her kana next to Heero's. It looked nothing like his. "It better not really say 'Big Fat White Chick', even though I'm just as Japanese as you are."

Heero rolled his eyes.

"Now I need a Scottish man to write it in that ancient Scottish with the funky letters."

"Gaelic," Heero muttered. He was clicking through Yoko's PowerPoint presentation, making sure there wasn't anything in there to disrupt his anonymity. Heero was always worried about that sort of thing, not that Yoko blamed him with what happened with Shell Shocked, and she understood the Preventers were hysterical over it too. Heero deftly went through her slides.

Each slide was a small biography on a family member, including pictures. Heero wouldn't let Yoko take a picture of him, so she had to sneak one instead. He had caught her about to take one, and reached for the camera. She took one anyway, so her picture of him was of him with his hand looming in front of his face, so his anonymity was kept anyway. Instead of looking goofy in the photo, he looked like a ninja. It was the hair.

"Alex's real name is 'Alecksandre?'" Heero asked, his eyes darting to her with piercing disbelief.

"It's true."

Heero gave her a look.

"It's true! It was supposed to be 'Alexander' but Dad was too drunk when he was filling out the birth certificate so it came out a girl's name. And Russian."

"Too drunk?"

"Or he was overcome with emotion at the birth of his first child. My version's better."

"The attending fills out the birth certificate."

"Dad's a doctor."

"A surgeon."

"Dad likes to get his hands dirty. And what do you know about birthing babies anyway?" Yoko tossed her hair over her shoulder. Heero went back to the presentation with a strong attitude of dismissal. "The less said about Alex's birth the better! Shoot, this family didn't _live _until I got here."

No response. But a profound silence instead, one that had been impressed, because the world was too loud.

Yoko looked closer at Heero. His eyes focused on the computer screen, unmoving and intense.

He was looking at the slide about Uncle Bobby. The picture of Bobby had a mobile suit in it. Heero just _looked_, his eyes unblinking. A wave of bitter acid rolled up in Yoko's stomach. Heero had seen the same photo a half-dozen times before, when Peggy had shoved photo albums under his nose, but the way he looked at the photo this time was different. It was faraway. Maybe, he missed the old days.

Yoko waved her hand in front of his hand. Slowly, Heero's eyes focused on hers.

"Is it morbid that I put in how everyone died?" she asked.

It took him a second to answer. "What's morbid is putting in predictions of how people are _going _to die."

"Oh pshaw! Mama's not really going to get squished by a falling piano! Get a sense of humor." Yoko bit her lips when Heero's expression didn't change. "Too in your face, huh? This world can't handle me. I'm too real."

Yoko couldn't forget the haunted, hollow look on Heero's face. And she guessed right: he really did miss the old days. The next day, Heero said when the next semester started, he was going to live on campus. And he was so cold. He was blank again, and guarded. He was gone.

**2**

"What do you want?"

"I want to know who Q is."

Without a word, Heero turned his shoulder to Yoko, directing his attention pointedly to his new cellphone. It had come just that day in the mail. It was so silky smooth and modern Yoko was sure it hadn't been released to the public yet, except maybe in Japan. Wherever it came from, it was another piece of technology to steal his attention away.

Yoko picked up the package it came in, looking for clues. It was certainly mysterious. Instead of a return address, all there was was a cursive and handsome "Q" written by a steady and dexterous hand. It looked rich. And instead of Heero's name being written on the recipient part, what was written was "01" which meant Heero anyway. These clues made it obvious who, or what, Q was.

"You realize you and your buddies are the only people paranoid enough to talk code through the mail."

"What about spies?"

"Don't flatter yourself." Yoko looked at the postmark, hoping for a clue of the package's origins, but it was just a bunch of gobbledygook. Spies in the postal office too? Sheesh, it was depressing. She wanted to know who the other Gundam pilots were!

"Must be," she said, archly, "from your secret girlfriend."

She hoped he'd burst out something like, "No she's not!" but he didn't, of course. Instead, Heero brought the phone up to bear.

"If you touch this . . ." he said.

He didn't have to finish. In the year and a half Yoko had known him, he never had to finish.

Yoko tucked herself on the couch next to Heero, and pretended to bump his elbow by accident. He ignored her, moving his thumb across the keypad of his phone, out of line of Yoko's sight. He was probably coordinating a hostile takeover of Argentina.

What would he want with Argentina?

Yoko took the stack of mail from the credenza and looked through it again, seeing if there was anything interesting in there. There were bills for David, a million dollar sweepstakes for Peggy, but nothing for Yoko Lang or even Lang Yoko. She never got anything in the mail.

She should have gone out cruising in Alex's new car with everyone else. Alex was cool. She didn't even mind he moved back home until he got himself a real job. He gave himself a new car for a graduation present. Heero would give himself a technical manual. Heero was too boring.

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall."

Calli sat at Heero's feet, drawing purple blobs into a coloring book with a marker. She was in love with Humpty Dumpty.

"All king's horses n all king's men couldn't put Humpty 'gether again."

Yoko sighed. Calli barely spoke, but she was positively eloquent and loquacious with that rhyme.

Finishing her song, Calli put her picture into Heero's lap. He rotated it a few times, trying to get his bearings on it. Then Calli smacked a quick kiss on Heero's knuckle. Heero froze, and then looked warily at Calli, the calculations racking up behind his eyes. Calli smiled, took her marker, and squiggled a thick line down the couch cushion.

**3**

After giving the couch a good scrub, Yoko took out her journal. It was a plain, nondescript and blue notebook, but on the inside she had written, _The Adventures of Heero Yuy! __Smiles!_ She was quite aware writing a journal about her brother was lame, but every time she thought about it, she said, "What're you gonna do?"

She hardly admitted it to herself, but there was a tiny, secret, faraway fear he'd be gone for real someday. Even a psychopath deserved to be remembered.

She wrote about the previous week, at Alex's graduation. David and Peggy had to trick Heero into going to the ceremony: they bought his plane ticket, and said it was non-refundable. Heero was going to refund them himself, but he opened his wallet, took a long look into it, and shut it again. He was so broke.

Some of the distant relatives were at the ceremony, most of whom hadn't seen Heero before. Yoko used to think Heero a cad, but now she understood why he had always rejected the idea of meeting any of them. Grandmama mistook his anti-socialism for something else, pinched his cheek and said, "So surprisingly polite! After what David told me . . ." David paled.

A knock on the front door broke Yoko away from her thoughts. Heero didn't even look up from his cell phone.

"Just stay comfortable, Your Majesty!" Yoko said, tossing her braid over her shoulder. Heero just kept pressing buttons.

Whoever knocking on the door had found the doorbell, and was making good use of it. Yoko wondered who could be so obnoxious, but when she looked through the peephole, she didn't recognize who it was. She thought about asking Heero if there were any guys with long hair out to assassinate him, but just last week Peggy told her off for making cracks like that. She opened the door instead.

They stared at each other. The man outside just looked at her, like she was a unicorn or something, his eyes getting big and watery. Yoko impression of him was just _hair_. There was a pair of huge purple eyes in there somewhere, but mostly it was just a braid longer than Yoko's and a bushy mustache. Finally, a slow smile spread across The Hair's face, and he said, "Hi!"

Something without substance, like a rushing wind or a specter, swept in between Yoko and the door. Yoko was pushed clear back, and the door shut on her before she realized it.

It occurred to her: it must be an arch-enemy!

Yoko rammed her face against the peephole, but no one was killing anyone else. Heero and The Hair were talking, The Hair gesturing loudly, but not defensively. Then, Yoko realized who he was.

She dashed to the living room, and came running back just as they were coming into the house.

"You should grow a 'stache," The Hair was saying, running a finger along his upper lip. "I can get into the bars now."

"You look like a terrorist."

"Harsh. I thought I looked more boy band."

Yoko thrust the package that Heero's cell phone came in into The Hair's face. "Are you Q?"

Heero sighed. The Hair's eyes drifted from the package to Yoko's face, and back again, before giving a cheesy grin.

"Q?" he said. "No. I'm Big D! Duo Maxwell. Don't tell me that's Heero's minivan out front!"

* * *

**Yee-haw! So I guess dinner will be next time. And next time: getting to know the family.**


End file.
